Design Philosophy
Overview Given the near limitless design possibilities offered in CDE, the choice of how to utilize the limited mass and cost budgets provided by campaign missions and some of the community driven tournaments. Quality vs Quantity Perhaps the most obvious question is quality over quantity and there is not truly a correct answer. Is it better to have 10 small lightly armed and armored ships, or one ship that is large and armed to the teeth? The 10 small ships might find themselves facing off against a powerful lasership and each be melted in turn before they can close the range. A heavily armored ship might not have such a problem. Likewise, a heavily armored ship could take a lucky hit from a large missile that slips by the point defense, disabling a critical system and rendering the ship lost or unable to complete a necessary objective. The same principle applies to drones and missiles. Overhead Costs Overhead costs are costs that every ship must endure. A ship with one gun, one engine, and one reactor needs a captain, but a ship with two guns, two engines, and two reactors still only needs one captain. Even if everything else is doubled, this provides a savings in mass and cost to a ship, meaning that deploying a ship with two of everything is more efficient than two ships with one of everything. Example In this example a basic ship is shown with a single 100Mw railgun powered by a single 106Mw reactor, along with relatively comparable stats in propulsion and DV. If the goal is to have the firepower of four of the 100mw railguns, the player would have the option to deploy four ships each with one railgun, or one ship carrying all four of them. Modules have not been replaced, only duplicated as needed. In this case, the cost savings were fairly negligible, though the tonnage savings were significant. So much so, that it is possible that the player could deploy one single railgun ship alongside the quad railgun ship (provided tonnage was the limiting factor), and effectively increasing the available firepower of their fleet by 25% while adding no additional mass. Advantages and disadvantages of small and large ships * As demonstrated above, larger ships overall are more efficient in terms of mass and cost. * Large ships tend to suffer from low acceleration and therefore maneuver slowly both in and out of combat. This is because the volume (and therefore mass) scales cubically while the surface area for engines scales quadratically. This issue can be mitigated with customized ultra-high thrust engines. They may also suffer from slow turnabout times and therefore are more easily hit in combat. * Though this square cube law works to the advantage of large ships meaning they gain overall Delta V by having more fuel contained inside a comparatively smaller surface area of armor. This could also equate to similar amounts of Delta V but thicker armor. * Large ships present a larger cross section and therefore if you and your enemy are using similarly ranged weapons, your enemy will be able to begin firing before you do. * Likewise, larger ships can efficiently mount larger, more powerful, longer ranged weapons. You need the same amount of crew to run a 1mw reactor and 1mw railgun as you do a 100mw reactor and 100mw railgun. * Large ships with high powered reactors, lots of reactors, or lots of high powered reactors will have very large heat signatures; meaning flares may be ineffective for misdirecting incoming enemy missiles. * Larger ships may not be viable for campaign missions that have very tight mass and cost restrictions. * Larger ships can act as ammo repositories for large stockpiles of drones and missiles. In a similar vein to the example above, one could carry twice as many missiles and drones on their ship, increase the available fuel a little bit, but not have to double everything else. * Larger ships are vunerable to being 'Cored' by missile strikes; in where a blast will go off inside the vessel and be largely contained by the (often very strong) armor wall that large ships have, destroying all of the internal modules and leaving your imposing dreadnaught little more than a very heavy and expensive useless armor shell. Redundancy Redundancy is the act of having duplicate parts, meaning that if one fails, the others can take over. In CDE parts do not fail unless they are damaged in battle. Nearly every system on a ship can be made redundant. Very small spacecraft may not have redundancies for their components, and may simply view their numerous dime-a-dozen sister ships as their redundancies. This principle is generally also applied to drones and missiles that can are sent en masse. Even if the enemy point defense takes out the 49 of the 50 missiles you send at them, the redundant 50th missile can still do its job. Larger ships and drones can have internal redundancies as well. Nearly every part can be made redundant. * It's a good idea to have at least two engines, if not for redundancy than to allow the ship roll control. Engines are difficult to make redundant as any engines not attached to the rear of the spacecraft are treated by the AI to be RCS thrusters. * Fuel tanks can be split both into groups and be placed vertically. Since fuel tanks will make up the majority of the internal volume of most spacecraft, they make good spacers between other more vital modules. Fuel tanks are one of the few components that can viably be made redundant on drones and missiles. Dividing your fuel tanks is a good way to ensure that one lucky shot does not drain your drone/missile of all its available Delta-V. * Reactors are extremely important, though the fact that they produce radiation can make hiding them around your ship more difficult without excessive need of radiation shields. One possible solution is to have reactors in the nose and tail of your ship and your crew compartments near the middle, with some fuel tanks putting space between them. * If the same reactor model is placed in multiple locations throughout the ship, they will all be considered part of the same cooling loop. This can prevent the unlucky scenario of having one dead reactor with its radiators intact and a still-functioning reactor with no way to dump its waste heat. This same principle applies to all modules that need radiators. * To that extent, having redundant radiators is always a wise choice as radiators are lightly armored and generally the first part of an otherwise well armored ship be lost in combat. * Crew modules can be split easily. However each crew module has overhead costs in terms of crew capacity (air and water technicians), and their comes a point where dividing the crew into smaller modules becomes more trouble than its worth. Crew modules can be pretty heavy, but cheap. It may be wise to have more crew than you need, particularly on larger ships. * Ammo modules, particularly those with a hazard for exploding should have lots of fuel or other non-critical components around them. This is the one case where it might be smart to put them all in one place. It may be even smarter to make a separate ship specifically to carry your dangerous payloads. * Weapons, of course can be made redundant. Most followers of the 'more dakka' philosophy make redundant weapon systems all the time without even realizing it. Turrets are on the exterior of a ship and tend to be lost almost as often as radiators. Lasers are exceptionally good at this seeing as their turrets can be separate from their chambers, meaning a network of redundant turrets and chambers can be built into your ship. Redundancy is not without its own drawbacks. For one; modules such as fuel tanks and crew modules cannot be attached radially (though they can be multiplied in the same stack) so ships that space things out along the main axis may wind up being longer and narrower, meaning a slower turning time and potentially a wider cross section, or lots of wasted internal space. The ship will also be more vulnerable to being broken in half by powerful missile and kinetic strikes. Having multiple modules will mean needing more crew to watch over them, and some types of modules. (Notably reactors) are much more cost and mass efficient at larger sizes. Additional Design Philosophies Drone Crew Workaround Drones do not require onboard crew modules. Instead they merely require a 1kg remote control. However drones must be launched from a carrier and the carrier must be larger than the drone itself. It may be tempting build a remote controlled warship piloted by a small crew sitting in an aluminum can somewhere. Drones also do not increase the crew requirement for the vessel they are deployed from. So even if your drone has 10 different types of reactor and gun, they still only require one pilot, when a crewed ship with such a loadout would require a hefty crew to maintain. Larger drones can get away with lots of redundancies because of this little trick, and see a great increase in efficiency of cost, mass, and delta-V not having to lug a crew around proportional to their size and complexity. Just keep in mind that the 'carrier' where these drones are launched from is a vulnerability, particularly if the drone and launcher is so bloated that the carrier has been left completely unarmored, undefended and unable to move. Standardizing Fleets Imposing standards and fleet doctrines comes with its own pros and cons, most of which are fairly self-evident. If one makes standard modules instead of custom-designed ones for every spacecraft, they can save a lot of time in the module editor, though the standardized module might be less efficient when used in certain designs. Standardizing a fleet to have a certain amount of Delta V and ensuring that all ships have a certain acceleration can help a great deal in ensuring that your fleet can stay together through orbital maneuvers, but can drive up mass and cost. Likewise, using one or a few propellants across your fleet is nice because one tanker can refuel your entire fleet without having to worry about juggling different propellant types. Though some designs may not benefit from the chosen propellant's properties. Broadsiding vs Frontal Attack Another choice is whether to build ships designed to broadside or attack frontally. Broadsiders are defined as ships with all radiators and vulnerable components on one side and all weapons on the other. Frontal Attack craft are designed to face the enemy head on and almost always have pointed fronts to ensure sloped armor causes enemy kinetics to ricochet. Each one has its own pros and cons. Broadsiders are good because they can bring 100% of a ship's weapons to bear at any one time, minimizing dead mass. If in the correct orientation their radiators are almost completely unreachable. They can also move sideways relative to the enemy while keeping all guns on them making them very difficult targets but can quickly become sitting ducks if the enemy fire stream manages to clip their rears and take out engines. The main disadvantage is that the Ingame AI often poorly handles broadsiding ships and they will sometimes pick the worst time to rotate them into a poor orientation exposing their tasty radiators to enemy fire. Frontal attack ships can also bring 100% of their weapons to bear, assuming they are designed right. They are faster to design given the symmetry tools and can often allow for much more of the hull's surface area to be used to attach weapons and radiators. Their radiators are often not protected as well but can be hidden on the backwards tapering part of the ship, assuming the heat output of the craft is low enough. Though the fact that when viewed edge on, the radiators make a very small target tends to help. Frontal ships have a hard time doding fire, seeing as they must turn and therefore expose their radiators and lose approximately half their available firepower. However ships designed in this manner can more easily have redundant external components. The sloped nose armor may also add additional mass. Variation and Specialization CDE battles are in essence a much more complicated version of Rock-Paper-Scissors. Every strategy has something that can counter it, and that is probably cheaper and lighter. A large Lasership might be able to eat an entire fleet of small missiles for breakfast, but a few big missiles with a few centimeters of Nirtile rubber will get through. Likewise a Railship might chew up the small missile fleet easily, but find its point defense saturated by the larger fleet of smaller missiles. The Railship might be able to engage the carrier, but lose out to its fleets of drones. The lasership might be able to eliminate the drones before they ever get close, but be ineffective facing off with the carrier itself. For this reason the best strategy very well may be to have no one defined strategy. While you may focus on building huge missiles or swarms of microdrones, it's a good idea to invest in a variety of weapon systems, even if some offer much more bang for their buck than others. This allows you to develop lines of defense. Even if you find yourself on losing ground you can still frustrate your opponent in a war of attrition, forcing them to expend time and resources fully defeating you since there's not one easy way to predict and counter each of your varied attacks and weapons.